As Hillary Rodham Clinton's first senior adviser for innovation, Alec Ross was one of the State Department's biggest champions of digital diplomacy, an advocate for a style of statecraft that capitalized on the technology and culture of the social networking era to reach people around the globe.

Now Ross is betting on a San Francisco startup as an agent for change in developing nations: He recently joined the board of Telerivet, a company that has developed a cloud-based, short message service (SMS) to allow people in the world's most remote corners to communicate with basic cell phones.

Ross is the latest former politico to take an interest in Silicon Valley startups, after former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joining Dropbox's board in April and Aneesh Chopra, the nation's first chief technology officer, signing on as an adviser to Box in March.

Ross told The Chronicle that he was compelled to join the board by the role an SMS platform such as Telerivet could play in helping developing nations.

"I was really compelled because it's a product that actually matters," he said.

What Telerivet provides, in short, is a platform for users (even those not technically savvy) to easily create their own SMS services, and then send messages via those services on any mobile network.

The reason that's useful in developing nations is that - with mobile usership rising incredibly quickly in many places - SMS is often many people's primary mode of communication. Many people have access to mobile phones that don't have an easy way to access the Internet. Setting up a custom SMS service might, for example, allow a business to communicate with customers, as one bookstore in the Philippines has done with Telerivet, or operate a mobile banking system, as one company in Mali has done for farmers.

There are other ways to create and run individual SMS services, but Ross said many are technically complicated or expensive.

CEO Joshua Stern, a Stanford computer science grad, was inspired to start Telerivet in part by a Peace Corps stint in Tanzania.

One of the things he realized was that there were already emerging communities of developers in many places. He wanted to build a service that could support them.

On Wednesday, Telerivet also announced a Cloud Script API platform that enables developers to create, monitor and modify custom mobile messaging services without the technical overhead usually required for custom SMS services.

Telerivet raised $1 million from investors in 2012 and is used in more than 150 countries.

Ross said he hopes Silicon Valley investors will seek more opportunity in developing markets - not just China and India.

"What I'd like is for people to see frontier markets as worthy of investment, instead of speculation," Ross said.